Tonight Catherine Brown from the Food Standards Agency is speaking at our annual meeting, these are some notes from her presentation:
The things she is covering are:
What is the role of the FSA?
Pressures on food systems
Roles and Responsibilities – who can do what to help?
The Roles of transparency and food champions
and then a Q&A
What is the role of the FSA?
The FSA – Food Standards Agency is not a department that just looks at Food Safety. It is a department that looks at consumer interests in relation to food.
Historically we have looked primarily at food safety but we want to move back towards what we were set up for, although food safety will play a part in that as it’s a very important issue, and this includes allergy advise.
So moving into the future, looking back at why we were set up, the FSA priories are that:
- Food is safe and it is what it says it is
- Consumers have access to the affordable healthy diet
- Consumers can make informed choices about what we eat.
We know consumers want to make choices for themselves and we’d like them to be able to make those choices and have access to information that matters to them to make informed choices.
Pressures on food systems
Climate change will have an impact on Global Food Production – security of supply is already a pressing concern.
Food production is already being disrupted in some areas of the world, and other areas of the world where food production is increasing because of the changing climate.
Increasing Population puts pressure on food production and land, we will have a lot more people to feed and we’ll have less land where we can grow it.
The economic situation across the world effect food supply, In Europe we have traditionally taken more than our fair share of global food, but that is changing.